Mar 152016
 

sc421

View of Linn Creek, Mo., written in white ink. Published by G. A. Moulder, Linn Creek, Mo. This appears to show high water on the Osage River and shows Linn Creek flooded to varying degrees.

Linn Creek was built at the junction of the Niangua and the Osage and was subject to flooding. Its hardy citizens preferred occasional floods to being fifty feet under water. The town resisted the Bagnell Dam project and fought Union Electric tooth and claw. The little county seat of Camden County would go under forty feet of water twenty years after this photo was taken when Lake of the Ozarks pooled behind Bagnell Dam. Many of the houses would be moved, some were torn down, some burned – mostly foundations were left.

Nov 162014
 

Lens & Pen has launched a new website (in addition to Dammingtheosage.com and our publishing site beautifulozarks.com). HYPERCOMMON.com will be a platform for a wide range of interests, encompassing our more than passing interest in pop culture. One of those varied interests is DAMS – worldwide, as well as those on the Osage River system.

Recently we acquired some new-to-us, old photos of Louis Egan along with more info  on the criminals who built Bagnell Dam and Lake of the Ozarks.

Two posts elaborating on information we had in Damming the Osage are now posted on HYPERCOMMON.COM.

See the set up in Union Electric’s Louis Egan: “I’m having the finest time in the world”

But after hubris comes – The Fall of Union Electric’s Louis Egan

Feel free to poke around on HYPERCOMMON.COM, which, in addition to DAMs, includes musing on hillbillies (recent posts on the iconic outhouse), souvenirs (“The most hideous souvenir EVER?”), small towns (the Buffalos of Buffalo), tourism (yes, we are looking at Branson), and confessions – which will handle a multitude of (mostly esthetic) sins!

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Aug 112014
 
Surveyor's Plat of Rocky Comfort at Lake of the Ozarks, 1937

Surveyor’s Plat of Rocky Comfort at Lake of the Ozarks, 1937

We can surmise that this is a surveyor’s map of a subdivision of seventy-four lots laid out by then-owners H. O. (Orville) and Ruth Gatlin, notarized on July 6, 1937 by “George Clifford Williams, Notary Public in and for Morgan County.” This mimeographed map handout shows residential lots apparently being offered for sale along the lake shoreline. The Gatlins were pioneer developers to an area as yet largely undeveloped for recreation and tourism, especially along the upper stretches, away from “The Strip” at Bagnell Dam and Osage Beach.

(click to enlarge)

In the early days of the Lake, Union Electric was more concerned with power production than with real estate sales. Truthfully, the sale of shoreline property and vacation homes wasn’t much of a business during the Depression and World War II. It’s possible that some of the current conflict over the intrusion of private shoreline lots into Union Electric property goes back to the early days of the utility company’s sales of shoreline properties. We don’t see on this map any indication that there is between the privately owned lots and the lake a zone that belonged to Union Electric by law. We wonder if this was disclosed to the buyers of these lots back in those days.  It is now alleged that owners have encroached on power company land.  For more info, see Donald Bradley’s article in the Kansas City Star (May 24, 2014), Lake of the Ozarks residents take land dispute to court.

The federal government saw the real estate arm of Union Electric as a  conflict of interest and the company was required to divest itself of large blocks of land around the lake. We’ve recently acquired an early printed brochure of the Willmore Company which “won the 1945 auction of Union Electric’s 42,000 acres ordered by the Securities and Exchange Commission.” Willmore later tried to sell 4,000 of those acres to a local businessman for $10,000, but Buford Foster couldn’t swing the deal. (Page 138, Damming the Osage).  Those acres included virtually the entire Shawnee Bend area with miles of shoreline.

According to Lake historian H. Dwight Weaver, the Gatlins moved to the Gravois Arm of the Lake the same year that the subdivision was platted (1937), purchasing 110 acres where they built Rocky Comfort Lodge. The large rock and frame lodge served guests until it burned in 1942. Rather than rebuild the lodge, the Gatlin’s turned their attention to their boat yard. The boat yard continued through several owners and today is Kelly’s Port Marina. Weaver’s book, History and Geography of Lake of the Ozarks, Vol. Two, provides a two-page account of the Gatlin’s businesses at Rocky Comfort and subsequent ownership of the property.

Mr. Weaver’s books are available through his website: Lake of the Ozarks Books – http://www.lakeoftheozarksbooks.com/

May 012013
 

James Reed

Press Photograph

We began our chapter on Lake of the Ozarks with a discussion of a now-forgotten lawsuit against Union Electric over the destruction of the trout pool at Ha Ha Tonka. This was a huge case that filled the newspapers and went on for years, and is now virtually forgotten.

Legendary Missouri politician and attorney for the Snyder family in this lawsuit was James A. Reed, a distinguished former U.S. Senator. In what Time magazine characterized in 1927 as a forest of competing “presidential timber”, they described him as Missouri’s “tough-fibred, silver-topped sycamore, U. S. Senator James A. Reed”  Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,736900,00.html#ixzz2QTHc0uU8

One of the few politicians who got on H. L. Mencken’s good side, when Reed retired from the Senate, Mencken saluted him: http://www.truthbasedlogic.com/ownman.htm 

His skill is founded upon a profound and penetrating intelligence, and informed by what amounts to a great aesthetic passion. There are subtleties in the art he practices, as in any other, and he is the master of all of them. The stone ax is not his weapon, but the rapier; and he knows how to make it go through stone and steel.

The “Fighting Senator from Missouri” was also paramour (and later husband) to Nellie Don, a Kansas City legend in her own right as founder of one of the largest dress manufacturing companies of the first half of the 20h century.

It is perhaps an understatement to say that our research led us to a cast of very interesting people whose lives touched the Osage River.


Continue reading »

Feb 272013
 

HaHaTonka Lake

2 Real Photo postcards by Strathman Photo

Both postcards have been sent, postmarked Linn Creek, but the dates are obscure – probably 1930s.

The exact origin of the low dam that created Ha Ha Tonka Lake is not clear. It’s possible that Colonel R. G. Scott, railroad promoter and real estate hustler, built it.  He came from Iowa about 1890 and  with a friend bought or optioned what was then known as Gunter Spring with a large parcel of land. In 1904, Scott sold the land and spring – now fancifully renamed Ha Ha Tonka with a suitable Indian legend to fit the name – to businessman Robert McClure Snyder of Kansas City.

HaHaTonka Lake Dam

The destruction of this little lake by the construction of Bagnell Dam caused a five year series of lawsuits and appeals. We devoted a significant part of the book (pages 92-97) to the lawsuit and subsequent appeals.

The lawsuit pitted well-to-do people with big egos against a well-to-do corporation with an equally big ego.  The first round began in 1930 when UE filed an exception to the award of $902/acre to the Snyder family for the acreage included with the trout lake. The Snyders sued and the lines were drawn.  The plaintiffs claimed the new lake had degraded their estate more than a million dollars.  High dollar lawyers and a high profile tale brought journalists to cover the lawsuit over ‘scenic beauty versus progress’. Witnesses during the ten-week trial included Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mount Rushmore, and W. H. Wurepel, who painted the mural of Ha Ha Tonka in the Missouri State Capitol. In 1932, the jury awarded the Snyder family $350,000.

Naturally UE appealed. Round Two began in 1935. A new verdict awarding $200,000 to the Snyders caused them to appeal, but Judge Otis denied the motion for a third trial in 1936 allowing the $200,000 judgment to stand.

Today the lake laps up against the old mill dam, but the trout dam is under water.


Continue reading »

Dec 032011
 
We are interested in things, the common denominator of which is the Osage River – for 35 + years exploring prairies, small towns, the Ozark-prairie border, doing some snake hunting in the middle part. Leland has fished the lower Osage since he was a child.That the river and its denizens had literary potential was not initially obvious. Leland’s father was an engineer for the state of Missouri, inspecting the water systems of small towns. Some days, young Leland would join him on his visits. He’d let the boy out to explore while he made his rounds. At Osceola one day, Leland got a Coke at the café by the low dam on the Osage and wandered down to the river. He found the carcass of a huge catfish, 5 feet long, floating belly up at the base of the dam.  
The next year he read Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea when Life magazine ran it as a series. In the end scene tourists look at the carcass of the great marlin and misunderstand the explanation of a local who says ‘sharks’ – meaning that’s what killed the marlin. They take his words to mean that the carcass is a shark. Flashback to the big, dead catfish. The Osage River became a literary river then – associated with words and stories. It was more literary than the clearer, scenic, Ozark rivers, which are art rivers, visual places, with smaller literary components. The Osage River is murky, with a more Shakespearian history, a more robust historical aspect. Clear rivers are rightly called scenic. Nature is more dominant there. Nothing like paddlefish or big blue catfish there. More artistic.We started on The Osage River: paddlefish, prairies, farms & villages, dams & reservoirs, imperial Indians, explorers, slickers, sportsmen, tourists & various violent, litigious & noteworthy events in the history of the Osage River Valley and at about the 500th page realized  it  had gone beyond affordable as we wanted an all color book to sell for less than $100.  It was our own form of cultural geography, an exploration of life along the river through generations, with a vaguely Carl Sandburg-1920’s-1930’s-Americana feel to it. We knew we didn’t want it to resemble William Least Heat Moon’s mooney stuff.We also realized that the real untold story is the machinations behind the building of Lake of the Ozarks and Bagnell Dam and Truman Dam and Reservoir. These are water resource crimes and misdemeanors on the order of Polanski’s Chinatown.  Lots of bitter court battles; two of three of the most important developers of Lake of the Ozarks went to federal prison; Environmental Defense Fund’s 1972 lawsuit against Truman Dam took years, was very contentious and has mysteriously disappeared from public record.

Mug shot of Walter Cravens, President of the Land Bank of Kansas City. Cravens was the prime mover behind the development of Bagnell Dam and Lake of the Ozarks in the mid-1920s. He served time in Leavenworth for financial shenanigans that included his efforts to swap Osage Valley farms for bankrupt, dusty Kansas farms (on which his bank held the paper).
No mug shot available for Louis Egan, high-flying president of Union Electric during the construction of Bagnell Dam, who would up in a federal facility in Florida.
We’ve left in a considerable amount on the imperial Osage Indians whose military power, some think, altered the development history of the central United States. And we’ve kept iconic crumbling small towns that pepper the prairie watershed of western Missouri and eastern Kansas.Previous to the dam-building era (the serious, high dams) of the 1920s, numerous efforts were made to improve steamboat travel by planning a series of locks and dams (only one of which was built).
Lock and Dam #1 about 20 miles up the Osage from its confluence with the Missouri River
More than 150 years of efforts to develop the river industrially that were unrealistic, sometimes criminally motivated, with lots of corruption and sloppy engineering have rarely produced the utopian benefits promised in whatever era.  Dammed as it is, resilient American culture on the lakes, tributaries, and watershed of the Osage is still interesting and Twainian in its vigor, variety.We’re ending up with 304 pages, 600 color illustrations (maps, old and new photographs).  Hope to send it to the printer in late spring; hope to send it to bookstores in fall, 2012; $35 retail – a huge bargain for such a book.